@Ira Seigel
You've probably got a few more years of MS dividends before the stock begins it's terminal decline to being totally worthless. Maybe 5 years, if you're lucky. In ten years the company will be broken up or dead.
But Microsoft have a lot less time than that to get their act together, and start learning this new game. Owning a credible slice of the pie today isn't about owning any one sector, it's about offering products and services ordinary people actually want to use, and therefore buy... in all sectors.
Microsoft's success to date has relied upon the majority of IT managers recommending their very average products in volume and then selling them bundled to the enterprise. That's not where the centre of gravity is in this new market.
Desire plays a huge part, but the key elements are usability and trust. Microsoft have neither of these - except perhaps in gaming.
I therefore disagree that they should concentrate on business markets. It's vital to their survival that they have a serious presence in all sectors. But to do so they have to offer credible products and services. They don't have enough credible products and services. The development lead-time is too long to create any before their main competitors gain the lion's share of all the key markets. So they won't survive.
And it's very very clear why this has happened. Ballmer is an accountant with the personality and skill set of a used car salesman, who fancies himself as a tech maven - pretending to predict the future with his ludicrous statements about "3 screens and a cloud" and perpetually promising "many new products in the pipeline". Ballmer has pursued the most lamentably poor set of strategies, and committed some catastrophic errors over the past ten years. He's virtually guaranteed his company's failure all on his own.
So, even though spending lots of time and money [they can obviously afford] touting WP7 at a gaming conference looks pathetic, and in truth it is [especially given MS had to bribe developers to port to WP7], if they want to maintain any credibility, it is actually what they should be doing. But of course they should first have ensured that WP7 was something that people wanted. There should also never have been a Project Pink/Kin. And if there was, it should have been kept secret - and obviously it shouldn't never have been released. But Microsoft have a pathetic need to boast about their projects - all of them, many well before they're ready for the market.
But it's precisely because of all this utterly flawed thinking that they needed to be starting from a very different place if they wanted to win. So many things needed to have been done differently. But it's in the DNA of the entire company, from the founder down, to play the game this way. It was bound to be their undoing eventually.
But please don't confuse me with someone who actually cares. I admire good brands. I forgive good brands when they make errors. But I don't forgive poor brands who's very foundations are as lamentably flawed as Microsoft's. And backing them is not something I would advise over the long term.
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